Police officers at Ben-Gurion Airport
Conclusion. Beginning: Convincing the Public of Safety – 2
These people pose no threat to anyone; there is no point in even checking them. A handful of terrorists is like needles in a haystack. But the approach of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is to check all haystacks to find the single needle.»
Sela also used the haystack analogy in a letter to Lenta.ru: «The ban [on transporting] materials, baggage checks are largely useless. Liquids are not the problem; the problem is people. The law enforcement community outside Israel has not yet adapted to the era of terrorism. It spends obscene amounts of money – including from airport fees – on providing no security at all.»
In the United States, Sela founded the company A.R.Challenges, which promotes TBS (Trust-Based Security system) – airport management companies are offered the opportunity to train their employees in Israeli security methods. «If the target is moving, move with the target. Everyone working in security knows this. Yet at an airport where everything is moving, the security checkpoint is stationary! Can you explain that?
TBS creates a new – moving – guard: here it is not the guard that moves after the targets, but the targets themselves are forced to pass through several security perimeters, each of which is engaged in recognizing signs [of ill intent]. At Ben-Gurion, we had 50 threats a day, but for 35 years we were free of terrorist attacks, and you could bring as much liquid as you want,» he shares his experience.
True, Sela complains, despite the fact that such a program saves up to 75% of funds and up to 90% of time, he has not found a positive response from potentially interested parties. «Large equipment manufacturers actively lobby their machines and force the U.S. government to compel other countries to buy them,» he says.
Moreover, the approach tested in Israel does not work everywhere. In the United States, for example, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the $878 million program to train airport personnel in ways to distinguish criminals by their behavior turned out to be ineffective. So, Vogel from Jane's Airport Review does not rule out that the bet may ultimately be placed on technology – the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is developing the FAST program (the acronym is formed from the phrase 'Future Attribute Screening Technology'), which, through analysis of facial expressions, gestures, visible signs of nervousness, as well as changes in body temperature, should identify potential terrorists.
Former Northwest Airlines security chief Laird also relies on technology, but in the traditional sense, considering talk of visual identification of terrorists to be empty. For him, preventing a terrorist attack is precisely «full body scanning or a strip search.» So he advocates the return of «strip scanners»: «Most people would prefer to be scanned by a machine.»
Russia's program for responding to terrorist challenges in transport can be compared to «a mishmash,» believes Andrei Soldatov, editor-in-chief of the site Agentura.ru. «It would seem that we have a National Anti-Terrorism Committee that coordinates the work of intelligence services and could develop such a coherent program. But it consists of borrowings from various foreign programs. From the United States, for example, the color-coded terrorist threat scale was taken, although this is a dubious acquisition from the standpoint of preventing terrorist attacks, because when the threat level is raised, intelligence services are simply flooded with thousands of false calls about bombs and suspicious persons,» he stated. The United States abandoned such a scale in April 2011 – a month before it was introduced in Russia.
Russian intelligence agencies chose two directions of work: first, they bet on the physical presence of uniformed personnel at transport facilities (this is clearly noticeable, for example, in the Moscow metro); second, a course was set for technical re-equipment of public order security points, Soldatov explains. But neither was brought to completion, the expert believes: «Some time ago, there was much talk about the need to install cameras with facial recognition capabilities. Ultimately, they were installed at the Moscow metro station 'Okhotny Ryad' and some train stations. At all other facilities, ordinary digital cameras were placed. And the level of police training can be judged by how public security or transport unit personnel behave.»
Professor of Criminology Shelukhin recounts his experience: in Cherkessk, where he was last summer, at the bus station there was not only no metal detector or X-ray machine, but not a single police officer. «Buses came and departed to all cities of Russia, but there was no security, they headed towards the Black Sea through Zelenchukskaya and Pregradnaya near Dombay and Arkhyz, but there wasn't even a metal detector. A hundred meters away there was a railway station from which not a single passenger departed, because trains had been canceled years ago – yet there was a metal detector there, and three or four bored police officers, and no one cared,» he told Lenta.ru.
Judging by what Russian anti-terrorism services are preparing for, the scenario of attacks that would be carried out by suicide bombers on board an aircraft or before boarding is not considered at all for training. In the 2000s, Russia experienced five terrorist acts on air transport, of which only in two cases, in 2000 and 2001, criminals hijacked a plane, and in three, suicide bombers were involved. In 2004, female suicide bombers blew up Tu-154 and Tu-134 planes in the air over the Tula and Rostov regions – they got on board without baggage screening by paying a bribe. And on January 24, 2011, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb in the arrivals area of Moscow's Domodedovo Airport. However, anti-terrorism services are still preparing for the seizure of a terminal or an aircraft by criminals who will make some political demands.
Anti-terrorism exercises at airports are held regularly: they took place, among other places, in April 2011 and December 2013 in Khabarovsk, in June 2011 in Belgorod, in September 2012 in Petrozavodsk, in March 2013 in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and six months later in Volgograd. In not a single case was there talk of preventing an attack that should have been carried out by a suicide bomber – according to the scenario of the exercises in Izhevsk in March 2011, the 'suicide bomber,' for example, went to negotiations.
Soldatov explains this by the fact that during the last reform of anti-terrorism structures, which took place in 2006-2007, the main security threat was by default considered to be 'potential destabilization of territory' – in case of its capture by militants. The FSB and other special services have no response to lone attacks.
Alexander ARTEMYEV.
lenta.ru